What is the biggest threat to your organization's assets, and how could this impact your future? Use the OCTAVE SM (Operationally Critical Threat, Asset, and Vulnerability Evaluation) methodology to analyze your company's risks.

This chapter is from the book

OCTAVE is focused on building an organizationwide view of information
security risks. Up to this point in the evaluation you have collected data about
three of the components of riskthreat, asset, and vulnerability. Your
analysis activities have focused on critical assets, how they are threatened,
and how they are technologically vulnerable. Now you broaden your view by
considering the organization. You examine how threats to your
organization's critical assets can affect its business objectives and its
mission.

Process 7 begins phase 3 of the OCTAVE Method, Develop Security Strategy and
Plans. This process creates the link between critical assets and what is
important to your organization, putting your organization in a better position
to manage the uncertainty that it faces.

9.1 Overview of Process 7

One of the evaluation attributes presented in Chapter 2 was the focus on
risk. This attribute requires you to look beyond the immediate consequences
(outcome) of the threat to a critical asset and place it in the context of what
is important to your organization (impact). Up to this point in OCTAVE, you have
collected data that will help you examine the security threats that affect your
organization's mission and business objectives. In process 7 the focus
shifts to risk identification and analysis.

Process 7 Workshop

The workshop for process 7 includes the core analysis team members as well as
supplemental personnel, if needed. Your team, including supplemental members,
should have the following skills:

If you decide to supplement the skills of your analysis team, you should
consider including people who understand the specific context of your business
environment (e.g., people from the legal department, strategic planners, people
from the business continuity office, policy managers). Your team needs these
skills, because process 7 requires you to examine how threats to critical assets
affect the business objectives and mission of your organization.

An experienced analysis team can complete the activities in about 4 1⁄2
to 6 hours. The activities of process 7 are summarized in Table 9-1.

TABLE 9-1 Process 7 Activities

Activity

Description

Identify the impact of threats to critical assets

The analysis team defines impact descriptions for threat outcomes
(disclosure, modification, loss, destruction, interruption). The impact
description is a narrative statement that describes how a threat ultimately
affects the organization's mission.

Create risk evaluation criteria

The analysis team creates evaluation criteria that will be used to evaluate
the risks to the organization. Evaluation criteria define what constitutes a
high, medium, and low impact.

Evaluate the impact of threats to critical assets

The combination of a threat and the resulting impact to the organization
defines the risk to the organization. The analysis team reviews each risk and
assigns it an impact value (high, medium, or low).

Risk

Risk is the possibility of suffering harm or loss. It is the potential for
realizing unwanted negative consequences of an event [Rowe 88]. It refers to a
situation in which a person could do something undesirable or a natural
occurrence could cause an undesirable outcome, resulting in a negative impact or
consequence.

A risk comprises an event, uncertainty, and a consequence. In information
security, the basic event in which we are interested is a threat. Uncertainty is
embodied in much of the information you have gathered during the
evaluation. The uncertainty concerns whether a threat will develop as well
as whether your organization is sufficiently protected against the threat
actor. In many risk methodologies, uncertainty is represented using likelihood
of occurrence, or probability. As Section 9.3 explains, there is a lack of
objective data for certain types of information security threats, making it
difficult to use a forecasting approach based on probability. To handle the
uncertainty inherent in risk, we propose an analysis technique based on scenario
planning.

Finally, the consequence that ultimately matters in information security risk
is the resulting impact on the organization due to a threat. Impact describes
how the organization would be affected based on the following threat
outcomes:

Disclosure of a critical asset

Modification of a critical asset

Loss/destruction of a critical asset

Interruption of a critical asset

The outcomes listed above are directly related to assets and describe the
effect of the threat on an asset. However, the impact is focused on the
organization; it is the direct link back to the organization's mission and
business objectives. This chapter shows you how to explicitly identify the risks
to your organization's critical assets. We begin looking at risk in the
next section, as we present an approach for describing the organizational impact
of threats to critical assets.